Contact Info:

Karen Akunowicz

Boston

Karen Akunowicz is James Beard’s Best Chef Northeast 2018 and an award-winning Cookbook Author.

A 2018 James Beard Award winner for Best Chef Northeast, she competed and was a fan favorite on Bravo TV’s Emmy nominated show “Top Chef” as well as the Food Network’s “Beat Bobby Flay”.

She is the co-author of Myers+Chang at Home (Houghton Mifflin 2017) and was called one of the “21 Badass Women Changing the Food World” by Marie Claire Magazine.

She started her career as a cook at the beloved Ten Tables restaurant in Jamaica Plain. She later fell in love with Italian food, cooking at Via Matta in Boston’s Back Bay where she met restaurateur Christopher Myers.

She lived and cooked in Modena, Italy for a year, as the Chef at L’Avian Blu before returning to the states. She went to work for Ana Sortun as the Sous Chef at Oleana Restaurant in Cambridge. There she studied the powerful spice driven cuisine of the Middle East and embraced the true farm to table mentality of the restaurant.

For seven years Karen helmed the kitchen at Myers+Chang where she created powerful, spicy, crave-able dishes, drawing inspiration from Chinese, Taiwanese, and Southeast Asian cuisine. She garnered local and national praise, as well as a four star review in the Boston Globe.

Karen writes lifestyle articles and recipes for Prowder.com and is proud to be a No Kid Hungry Chef, working with the organization Share our Strength to eradicate childhood hunger.